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Water-scrum-fall is a term coined in 2011 by Dave West of Forrester Research to describe the reality of the current state of agile development. Agile development in a non-agile world is the reality in most enterprises. Although, more and more enterprises are switching to agile or agile-like practices for their development work, the environment around them still functions in a waterfall manner. There are the business approvals, approvals from enterprise architecture and from security and so on that add waterfall-like steps before development... [More]

IBM partnered with Software Quality Engineering to execute a survey that explores where today’s testers are spending their time, what obstacles they most often encounter and where they think their attention should be focused. These are the responses from 250 test professionals - primarily quality managers, test managers and test leads - from around the globe, all with 6 or more years of experience. Check out the complete results of the survey.

If you don’t have the right tools for quality management in place when you are working on a project, you could end up facing some tough challenges. About four or five years ago, I worked for a defense company in Turkey where I was responsible for configuration management and IBM Rational tools maintenance activities for the IBM Rational DOORS , Rational ClearCase , Rational Rhapsody and Rational Publishing Engine (RPE) products. One day, our test team started to complain because they were having some problems... [More]

In this smarter world, the complexity of software, products and systems is continually increasing. Innovative functionality has become an important competitive differentiator while quality has become a hygiene factor. Quality has to be considered across the development cycle starting from the concept stage to until end of life or maintenance. A recent IBM white paper examines just how the role of quality assurance has changed and provides best practices to extend Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to include quality management and improving... [More]

Too often, current application lifecycle management (ALM) practices are cumbersome to the point that they slow down the development process. The tremendous number of variables in the ALM process makes software development work resource intensive and difficult to manage. How can we make this better? As a cloud services provider, part of the solution seems obvious to us. On-demand cloud services allow access from anywhere, at any time and eliminate dependency on physical infrastructure and capital expenses. This makes software developers’ lives... [More]

Why software isn’t so soft For something with the word “soft” in the name, software is very hard indeed. Every study I’ve seen has shown that we, as an industry, are terrible at estimating how long it will take to create and not good at all at producing it without defects. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but mostly it boils down to the fact that creating software is far more akin to a craft than an engineering discipline. Each software product is lovingly sculpted from the depths of our creative minds. Developing software is... [More]

As our need to deliver software faster and meet market demands has increased, something usually has to give. The old adage says that you can only deliver against 2 of the 3 mandates (cost, timeframe, quality), so choose which one won’t happen. However, that is no longer an acceptable answer. As an increasing number of organizations are going “agile”, quality concerns are being raised yet again. But being “agile” doesn’t have to mean sacrificing quality. As a matter of fact, with agility can come increased quality as more people are testing the... [More]

The world of mobile development is moving faster than most of us can keep track. IBM recently announced our mobile enterprise solution, MobileFirst. We sat down with a few of our mobile leaders to ask some common development questions. Have more questions to ask? Post them in the comments and our leaders will answer! Meet the leaders Charles Rankin is a Senior Software Engineer who has worked for IBM in Austin, Texas for the past 19 years. He has worked in a variety of roles including test, development, architecture, and management. Presently,... [More]